Posts Tagged ‘testing’

For example, the former head of assessment at CPS, Carole Perlman, wrote this letter to the Chicago Tribune criticizing the use of standardized tests to evaluate teachers. “Though superficially appealing, using test scores to evaluate teachers will create more problems than it will solve. Excellent teachers will be erroneously labeled as incompetent, while poor teachers may get a pass. Students will not benefit.”

And just a few days ago, I received this wonderful e-mail from former teacher Judy Tomera, who agreed that I could share her comments:

Dear Julie Woestehoff, May 26, 2014

I’m writing to tell you how much I enjoyed you presence on Dick Kay’s show a Saturday or two ago and am looking forward to your next appearance. I think what you had to say about schools and testing, in particular, is spot on. It is my opinion after spending about 40 years teaching elementary school (K – 5th grade in rural, urban, and suburban schools) that standardized testing is a waste of time and resources for many reasons, one of which is that they do not test what you want to know about a child. Many of the questions are ridiculous, designed to lead children astray so the standard bell curve can be preserved. And, as you well know, the tests are not directly linked to curriculum so they are not a valid indicator of what children have learned in school.

For example:

In first grade in the 80s children were asked to identify which animal lays eggs and fill in the circle below it. (California Achievement Test) The pictures were of an elephant, bunny, snake, and horse. Enough 6 and 7 years olds were drawn to the bunny (think April and Easter when most testing is done) to elicit the required number of wrong answers to maintain the bell curve.

In third grade in the 2000s on a reading test 3rd graders were asked to find the word in the row that has the same vowel sounds as the first word. The first word was BEAR and the other words in the list were BEEN, EARS, HAIR, and HERE. Many children marked EARS because it had the same vowels, not vowel sounds. That item was also included on purpose to draw children to a wrong answer. I doubt if the children that missed that item would have read the following sentence incorrectly: The bear had brown ears. Semantics and syntax play an important part in reading correctly. What child who can read would read the sentence as The bear had brown airs, which is the correct response to the question if students had indeed understood the question correctly.

Other examples of deliberate insertion of misleading questions can be identified in most standardized tests. In order to maintain the bell curve, half of the test takers must score less than the 50th percentile in the control groups and half over. Therefore when developing the test items some questions must be more difficult (tricky) or in some cases easier to maintain the bell curve in score distribution of the sample groups. Questions of recall test memory, not skill. Questions not linked to curriculum are not useful. Yes, you are right, testing is a mean trick to play on children.

If you ask most adults, they do not have fond memories of the week of achievement testing. Now in most states it isn’t just in the spring. More is better. It is like getting on the scale every day to see if you have lost weight. It has nothing whatever to do with that goal. Eating less and exercising are better ways of achieving the goal. Time in the classroom providing enriched learning environments and experiences are far better at achieving best student outcomes.

And if you want to know how a child reads, listen to him or her. Fluency, expression, even a few questions of inference or recall are good. And, by the way, it is okay to look back. What good reader doesn’t from time to time. Otherwise, here again, you are just testing memory.

Another practice during testing time is to read aloud test items in the math section to the children who are struggling readers. The logic is that you are not testing math skills if the student is required to comprehend the question by reading it themselves as reading skills are involved. However, what I found in my classes is that my weaker readers scored higher on the math test than many of the children who in their daily lives demonstrated greater understanding of math concepts. Why not read the math questions to all the children. Oral inflection is a big aid to understanding the written word so students who were read the questions had a big advantage over those who didn’t. You know, level the playing field.

Before I moved to Chicagoland, where I taught in a private school as the public schools could hire two beginning teachers rather than one experienced one like me (but that s another issue), I taught in a public school in Oregon that was rated number 1 in the state. We would hold workshops two or three times a year to share our program (multiage classrooms) and teaching strategies with teachers and districts throughout the state who would send staff to our school to spend the day with us and our children. Soon after I moved to NW Indiana, the Oregon State Department of Education instituted standardized testing as means to evaluate effectiveness of schools. How much you improved from year to year was the basis for high evaluation. The more you improved from the previous year, the higher your rank. So my school went from being the best school in the state to in the middle somewhere simply because our scores, still very high, were not significantly higher than the very high scores from the year before. Schools that had previously scored lower and struggling schools that gained a few points on the outcomes of the test results indeed showed more improvement, though their scores were not in the high range and they got the higher ratings and headlines in the newspaper. And, as we all know, what is in the newspaper counts. It is politics. I felt for the staff, students and parents of my Oregon school for doing an excellent job and not being recognized for that.

Testing is a mirage. An expensive one. There are far better ways of showing individual student progress and many schools are using them to communicate with parents. When parents understand the issues and can see the authentic growth in their children they are pleased. When they can’t, they and teachers are at least pointed in the direction that encourages improvement. Test scores, in themselves do not do that. They are misleading and dishonest and suck the enthusiasm and confidence out of learners.

Thank you for being so articulate in highlighting one of the many problems schools face and leading the way to improvement. I am in your parade.

Today’s story by Chicago Sun-Times Watchdog reporters Tim Novak and Chris Fusco exposes the imbalance of white students in Chicago’s four north side selective enrollment high schools, and the fact that the disproportionate number of white students has become even more lopsided since the courts ended the Desegregation Consent Decree in 2009.

Sun-Times figures show that white students made up an average of 41 percent of freshmen admitted to Jones, Whitney Young, Northside Prep, and Walter Payton over the past four years, compared to 29 percent in 2009. The overall enrollment of white students in CPS is about 9%.

I met with Novak and Fusco as they were preparing the story. I made the point (which did not specifically end up in their story…) that test scores unfairly act to keep low-income students out of selective enrollment high schools, since test scores are most closely aligned to economic status.

But their analysis showed that the system is even more insanely unfair. For 80% of the applicants, test scores are factored in with census tract data in a 4-tier system that actually forces students from households with an average income of $42,000 near 95th and Halsted to compete with the test scores of Gold Coast students whose families make over $300,000 per year.

How do you suppose that match-up usually turns out?

Back in 2009, we recommended that the selective enrollment high school process factor in actual family income, not community income, and that it use income level to offset test score advantages of white and higher-income students. Even cynical PURE didn’t suspect the extent to which CPS seems to have actually rigged the system.

Pander Prep

Mayor Emanuel’s proposal to locate a new Obama College Prep on the north side rather than the south side where the President worked and lived — and where the most under-resourced and least popular selective enrollment high schools are – is just one more example of the utter cluelessness of Chicago’s white power elite. One point of mine that did make it into print in the Sun-Times story is that the explosion of the most attractive selective enrollment “seats” on the north side didn’t happen until after race was removed as an criteria for acceptance.

Good afternoon. My name is Julie Woestehoff and I am the Executive Director of Parents United for Responsible Education, or PURE, a 26 year old parent-based public school advocacy organization. For more than 15 years, since the beginning of the high-stakes testing era, I have been working with parents to challenge the misuse and overuse of standardized testing in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) and across the country.

There is nothing inherently wrong with standardized tests that are used properly, as designed and in a limited way, as just one of a set of true multiple measures taken over time with a variety of tools.

What is wrong – very wrong – is the misuse and overuse of standardized testing that has been growing at an alarming rate in recent years. It is critical that legislators, other public officials, and the general public understand that this is NOT the kind of testing that we – or even my grown children — experienced. When you hear what the parents and teachers who are here today tell you about what testing is like in our schools today, you will understand that the current misuse and overuse of testing is seriously harming our children and drastically interfering with their opportunity to receive a meaningful education.

I want to thank Senator Cunningham for introducing SB 2156 and SB 3460, which address some of the major problems created by today’s inappropriate use of standardized tests. My purpose in testifying here today is to share some facts in support of these bills and to offer some further recommendations to address the crisis of test misuse and overuse in our schools.

■ Too many tests – PURE supports SB 2156, NAEP model

PURE supports the annual limitation on the number of standardized academic achievement tests given to students as proposed in SB 2156. As illustrated in the attached chart created by the coalition More Than a Score, which PURE helps convene, the total number of standardized test “events” in CPS this year may run close to 300 for all students and all administrations (see Attachment 1 – More Than a Score chart, “The Reality Behind the ‘New, Reduced’ CPS Assessment Policy”).

This does not include the enormous amount of time given over to test preparation and review.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), or the “Nation’s Report Card,” tests students only in the “critical juncture” years of 4th, 8th and 11th grades, and tests only a sampling of students in those grades, with no stakes attached for students. Using NAEP’s highly-respected testing schedule would help put the brakes on the massive expansion of testing that has hijacked our children’s education.

Recommendation: Any large-scale statewide standardized testing system should be limited to sample testing in three benchmark years only.

For example, according to the makers of the SAT-10, which CPS has been using to retain students:

Achievement test scores may certainly enter into a promotion or retention decision. However, they should be just one of the many factors considered and probably should receive less weight than factors such as teacher observation, day-to-day classroom performance, maturity level, and attitude.

But this has not stopped CPS from their inappropriate use of the Iowa test in the 1990’s, then the ISAT/SAT 10 in recent years and, this year, the NWEA MAP. CPS also uses these tests in other ways for which they were not designed including school closing and turnaround decisions as well as teacher and principal evaluation.

CPS will say that it does use multiple measures to make promotion and other high-stakes decisions, but that is simply not true. In fact, the CPS promotion policy sets up multiple barriers, not multiple measures. That is, any one measure by itself will trigger the decision to send a student to summer school, and any one measure by itself can cause a student to flunk summer school and be retained. Test scores also vastly outweigh any other measure in the CPS school accountability system.

Recommendation: State law should prohibit the use of state tests in making high-stakes decisions about students.

They raise concerns that standardized tests may not be based on knowledge of child development and are therefore not suited to the developmental abilities of young children. Tests often miss important objectives of early childhood like creativity, problem-solving, and social and emotional development, which can lead to teaching of skills in ways that are not effective or meaningful, to the narrowing of the curriculum, and to less time for play and hands-on learning experiences that are important foundations for later school success. In other words, focusing on testing in the early years may lead to less effective teaching and learning, not the other way around.

Recommendation:We support the language of SB 3460.

Test bias

There are significant racial and cultural biases in standardized tests that must be taken into consideration. I’m not just referring to the obvious bias of questions about yachts and tennis doubles, which “bias review” is supposed to be addressing. Research has shown that test questions that are answered correctly more often by black students than by white students have been rejected by test makers, apparently in an effort to assure that test results showing African-Americans scoring lower than whites are “consistent” from year to year (see Attachment 4 – PURE Fact Sheet, “Racial Bias in Standardized Tests” and Attachment 5 – Fair Test, “Racial Justice and Standardized Educational Testing”).

It is well-known that the best predictor of standardized test scores is economic level. It’s no coincidence that the schools in our poorest communities in Chicago have been labeled as failures based on test scores, and are the main targets for closure and privatization by charters or privately-run turnaround agencies.

Other recommendations

There are far better ways to assess children that support rather than take time and resources away from teaching and learning, and that do not harm children the way test misuse and overuse harms them. Over the years, PURE has proposed balanced assessment legislation to assure that students and schools are assessed using valid, appropriate, multiple measures. I attach a summary of our most recent proposal (see Attachment 6 – “PURE Proposal: Legislative Changes to Implement a Balanced State Assessment System for Illinois”).

PURE has proposed the common sense notion of going back to using student report cards as the primary evaluation tool for student work. There may have been some validity to concern about grade inflation 15 years ago, but if report cards are still useless, it is the responsibility of the district to provide correctives. Report cards are far more meaningful to parents, who are not allowed to see any part of the tests that currently dictate major life decisions about their children. PURE’s proposal has also been endorsed by More Than a Score (see Attachment 9, PURE, “Proposal for a Year-Long Student-Centered Elementary Promotion Policy for CPS”).

Finally, we recommend an explicit opt out right for parents in state law. Because districts have acted irresponsibly by violating standards and ethics of the assessment profession, parents must have the ability to advocate for and protect our children. When CPS parents opted out or tried to opt their children out of a meaningless administration of the ISAT last month, they were harassed, their children experienced retaliation, and investigators used pressure tactics to get students to report on possible teacher involvement. This is unacceptable.

Sample opt out language from California state statutes: “A parent or guardian may submit to the school a written request to excuse his or her child from any or all parts of any test provided under (testing statue reference). Notwithstanding any provisions of law, a parent’s or guardian’s written request to school officials to excuse his or her child from any or all parts of the assessments administered pursuant to this chapter shall be granted.”

I once shared a very interesting bus ride to the airport with the president of Riverside Publishing, who write the Iowa Tests, back when Paul Vallas was using the test as a grade promotion barrier. Shortly after our visit, Riverside decided to stop providing CPS with grade-equivalent score labels which CPS used to make the political claim that flunked students were simply reading or doing math “below grade level.” Unfortunately, that did not stop CPS from continuing to misuse the test.

Certainly one reason tests are being misused and overused may be that there’s just too much money in testing for test publishers to want to police the use of their own tests. This is about to become an even more lucrative industry with the onset of the Common Core State Standards and CCSS tests.

Another reason may be the political pressure from well-funded groups that are out to privatize public education and undermine the teaching profession. This pressure forces otherwise well-meaning school officials to throw out what they know about teaching and learning and replace it with test prep.

A third reason may be that, as we move into the Common Core testing era, students are taking tests to test test questions for test publishers and to get data about how they might do on future tests. School officials sometimes use this information to identify the students who score closest to the all-important “meets” cut-off point, and focus extra school resources on those “bubble” kids.

It’s important to note that these reasons have everything to do with the best interests of adults, and nothing to do with what’s best for children.

Think of tests as steroids. Properly used in a limited manner by conscientious professionals, steroids can improve health. But when steroids are misused or overused, major health problems can ensue. Unfortunately, many school officials are like bad coaches, pushing steroids on the players because other schools are doing it, in a perverse effort to stay competitive.

Thursday April 24, 6 – 9 pm: DePaul School of Education Spring Forum, DePaul Student Center, Room 120, 2250 N Sheffield. Imagine a public school with a portfolio-based constructivist approach to teaching and learn, staff based decision-making and governance, modeled on democratic and progressive education principles, fostering active and engaged learning, with a broad and rich curriculum.

Saturday, April 26, 10 am to noon, Chopin Theater, 1543 W. Division St.:
A Quality Education for Every Child, a Talk with Pasi Sahlberg
Raise Your Hand is sponsoring a talk by Pasi Sahlberg, the author of Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland

Tuesday, April 29 at 6 pm at Union Park, 1500 W Randolph. Of course, the More Than a Score testing forum, Changing the Stakes on Testing. More here!

The date and time have been finalized for the subject matter hearing on testing sponsored by the Illinois Senate Education Committee, and you are invited!

The hearing will take place this Friday, April 25, at 2:30 pm at the Bilandic Building, 160 N LaSalle Street in Chicago, Room 600.

This is our chance to share our concerns about testing with our state legislators. If you want to speak, fill out a witness slip here (be sure to check that you are FOR or a proponent of both bills).

The specific bills under consideration at this hearing are sponsored by Sen. Bill Cunningham, who represents communities in the far southwest side of Chicago and southwest suburbs:

SB 2156 (Chicago only) allows no more than four tests per year – two state standardized tests, and two tests to “comply with the Evaluation of Teachers” statute.

SB 3460 would prohibit the administration of tests to children enrolled in kindergarten through the second grade “for any reason other than diagnostic purposes.”

Our friend Jim Broadway, of State School News Service, says that these bills “faltered, missed their deadlines and have been sent back to the Committee on Assignments, which is the graveyard for Senate bills that never advance out of the Senate.” However, bills are never really dead in Springfield, and you can bring up any other testing issues as well. Let’s not let this opportunity pass by without a strong showing from Chicago parents!

STATEMENT OF SUPPORT FOR CHICAGO TEACHERS REFUSING TO ADMINISTER THE ILLINOIS STANDARD ACHIEVEMENT TEST

FROM UNIVERSITY EDUCATION FACULTY

As university faculty whose responsibilities include preparing future educators, we support the action of teachers at the Saucedo and Drummond elementary schools in Chicago who are refusing to administer the Illinois Standard Achievement Test (ISAT). Over a decade of research shows that an over emphasis on high-stakes standardized tests narrows curriculum, creates social and emotional stress for students and families, drives committed teachers out of the profession, and turns schools into test-prep factories with principals forced to comply as overseers—especially in low-scoring schools. We understand assessment as the process of gathering evidence about learning, from multiple sources, so that teachers can better support student learning. The ISAT, in contrast, contributes virtually nothing. CPS no longer uses the ISAT for promotion, graduation, or eligibility for selective-enrollment schools and is phasing it out after this year. It is not aligned with Common Core State Standards—which, regardless of how one sees them, Illinois has already adopted—and does not help teachers improve student learning. The pre-service teachers with whom we work are demoralized about a future of teaching in such a test-driven atmosphere. We teach our students—future educators—to stand up for their students, families and communities, and to take principled stands for social justice. That’s what the Saucedo and Drummond teachers are doing. We applaud them and stand with them.

(To add your name to this list, email Gutstein@uic.edu with your name, university affiliation, and department)

Pauline Lipman, University of Illinois at Chicago, College of Education

Rico Gutstein, University of Illinois at Chicago, College of Education

Asif Wilson, University of Illinois at Chicago, College of Education

Daniel Morales-Doyle, University of Illinois at Chicago, College of Education

Eleni Katsarou, University of Illinois at Chicago, College of Education

Arthi Rao, University of Illinois at Chicago, College of Education

Joshua Radinsky, University of Illinois at Chicago, College of Education

Irma Olmedo, University of Illinois at Chicago, College of Education

David Schaafsma, University of Illinois at Chicago, English Department

Kenneth Saltman, DePaul University, College of Education

Joel Amidon, University of Mississippi, School of Education

Nicole Marroquin, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Department of Art Education